Segregation has shot up in Madrid – due less to property speculation than a lack of affordable housing. Photograph: Alamy

“Reclaim your community,” declared the posters. “Hipsters beware.” Pinned around London’s East End last month, they announced Fuck Parade, an anti-gentrification demonstration that culminated in an attack on a café selling bowls of cereal. Long the first port of call for cash-strapped new arrivals in the city – Irish, Jews, Bangladeshis and many others – the East End was changing, said Fuck Parade’s organisers. They explained that they were protesting against increasing economic segregation: the construction of “luxury flats that no one can afford” instead of “genuinely affordable housing”.

London certainly is a very inequitable city. The richest 10% of its residents own 60% of the city’s assets. The top 10th of London earners take home around 4.5 times as much as the bottom 10th.

However, according to new research, and unlike many European cities, between 2001 and 2011, London did not actually become more economically segregated … largely because the city was so divided to start with.

“In the central parts of London, housing is extremely expensive and segregation is already high,” says Maarten van Ham, professor of urban renewal at Delft University of Technology and the University of St Andrews. Van Ham co-authored the study, which measured a range of variables associated with segregation: income, occupational status, education and more.

Peabody housing estate just off Poplar high street in East London. Canary Wharf is in the background. Photograph: Photofusion/Rex Shutterstock

The research found that, in the decade from 2001, segregation increased in 11 of 13 major European cities (the other exception, along with London, was Amsterdam.)

In Scandinavia, for example, the traditional Nordic model seems to be fraying at the edges. In Stockholm, social housing is being sold into the private sector; even in famously equal Oslo, rich and poor are increasingly living parallel lives in different parts of the city.

Across the Baltic Sea, Vilnius and Tallinn have gone from Soviet cities with limited private ownership of housing to hyper-capitalist ones in just 25 years.

Throughout Europe, inequality is on the rise. Our cities are looking and feeling very different, as middle-class professionals flock to central neighbourhoods while immigrants increasingly congregate together, often in suburban enclaves. “Without inequality, there wouldn’t be any segregation by income,” says Van Ham. “If inequality increases in a city, you expect segregation to rise, too.”

For example, the city where segregation increased the most among the 13 studied was Madrid – not due to an influx of property speculators, but rather a lack of affordable housing, which, for example, forced young people to stay living with their parents. In Vienna, the number of professionals has doubled in the past decade, squeezing out poorer residents.

In 2005, riots broke out across the Parisian banlieues. The insurrection was, in part, a protest against inequality, and yet segregation has increased in the years since.

Parts of Riyadh are split along gender lines, with women-only shopping centres, restaurants and a women’s day at the zoo

Over the past three decades, it has increased in most US cities, too. The most extreme economic examples are concentrated in college towns – in part because the vertiginous cost of American university education attracts only the wealthiest. But it affects larger cities, too: New York, Philadelphia and Chicago are segregated along economic lines and are getting worse.

North of the border, in Winnipeg, a “great divide” has opened up between the 80,000-strong indigenous population and the rest of the city’s residents. Most of Winnipeg’s First Nations community live in the inner city and the North End, two of the poorest postcodes in Canada. On a whole host of indices, from access to housing to exposure to violent crime, aboriginals fare worse.

Research shows that Detroit is the most racially unequal metropolis in the US. Photograph: Rebecca Cook/Reuters/Corbis

But for the starkest examples of segregation, we have to look beyond Europe and North America. In Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, hundreds of thousands of erstwhile nomads live in felt-covered “ger” tents on scrubland on the outskirts of the city, while downtown, the nouveau riche shop in expensive designer stores. And in Johannesburg, walls – often topped with broken glass and surveillance cameras – separate the wealthy from the hoi polloi. The South African city, once strictly segregated along racial lines, is now divided by income.

Cities, of course, are not just divided by money. Belfast, too, has walls – in this case iron “peace walls”, some almost 20ft high, built to separate nationalists and unionists. In the Indian state of Gujarat, scene of vicious anti-Muslim riots in 2002, many Hindus and Muslims live in separate, sprawling ghettos. Parts of the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, are split along gender lines, with women-only shopping centres and restaurants, and even a dedicated women’s day at the local zoo.

Indices of dissimilarity – which measure the evenness of two groups (such as ethnic or occupational) in any given area – can be used to chart segregation. According to one study, Detroit is the most racially unequal metropolis in the US, with a dissimilarity score of almost 80: a largely black inner city, with whites living predominantly in the surrounding suburbs.

Racial segregation may not be inevitable in large multi-ethnic cities. In LA, segregation has actually decreased

Belfast’s “peace walls” are almost 20ft high, built to separate nationalists and unionists. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

And yet, racial segregation may not be inevitable in large multi-ethnic cities. In Los Angeles, for example, segregation has actually decreased, according to new research. In 2000, 40% of LA’s population lived in strongly segregated neighbourhoods; by 2010, it was one-third. The biggest fall has been in the number of heterogeneous white areas. “Diversity and heterogeneity is the new structure of urban society,” the authors conclude.

In Europe, however, cities are likely to become more divided as the impact of the 2008 financial crisis really starts to bite. “The crisis has probably caused inequality to rise in Europe,” says Van Ham. “But there is a serious time lag – five to 10 years – between rising inequality and when it affects cities.”

Compared with other cities around the world, however, Europe’s capitals are still relatively mixed. The oil-rich Angolan capital of Luanda has been, in some measures, the world’s most expensive city for each of the last three years. The super-rich live in gated, high-rise apartments; hotel rooms cost upwards of £250 a night for the most rudimentary. Poorer residents, meanwhile, struggle to survive in makeshift housing, unable to afford the eye-watering prices for basic staples such as milk and tomatoes.

In 1971, a secret report by the Northern Irish government criticised the speed with which walls, gates and fences were being constructed in Belfast to separate Catholics and Protestants. The so-called “peace lines”, it said, were creating an “atmosphere of abnormality” in the city. But the Stormont report writers did “not expect any insurmountable difficulty” in bringing down the barricades once the violence had subsumed.

Now, more than 40 years after the British Army constructed the first of those barriers, Belfast is still scarred by them: corrugated iron fences, some as high as 18ft, topped with barbed wire. Defensive architecture, it turns out, is far easier to erect than tear down. The city’s gates and walls have become “part of the built environment”, according to Jonny Byrne, a lecturer in politics at the University of Ulster. “The Berlin Wall had to come down for Berlin to be normalised. We have normalised Belfast without taking down the walls.”

Indeed, Belfast’s defensive walls are arguably the most famous of those many “divided cities” riven by ethnic conflict. When I was in Mitrovica, Kosovo, another divided city, ethnic Serbs informed me what a putative peace-building trip to Northern Ireland had actually taught them. “We need bigger walls,” one said.

In fact, the number of barricades in Belfast has actually increased since the Good Friday Agreement brought the Northern Irish conflict to an end in 1998. A 2012 study found almost 100 walls, fences, gates and roads forming “interfaces” between communities across the city.

It can seem baffling to outsiders. Why does Belfast still cleave to its walls? In 2008, then New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said that bringing down the barriers would open “floodgates of private investment”. Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government has vowed to remove all the peace walls by 2023.

Yet the scale – if not the impossibility – of that bold promise is all too apparent in North Belfast, a four-mile-squared patchwork of sectarian enclaves and divided loyalties that is home to almost half of the city’s peace walls. North Belfast witnessed some of the worst violence: a fifth of the more than 3,000 people killed during the Troubles died among these streets, where kerbstones alternate between nationalist green and unionist red, white and blue. Most people live on streets that are 90% Catholic or Protestant. The neighbourhood is also among the most economically deprived areas in Northern Ireland. Unlike the bustling city centre, there are no upmarket bars or expensive cafes serving flat whites.

“People say that when the walls come down, the investment will flow in. But they can’t even put in light bulbs here,” says Rab McCallum, a republican ex-prisoner who works for the North Belfast Interface Network (NBIN).

NBIN has been working for the better part of a decade out of a low-ceilinged office in a red-brick terrace near Cliftonville FC’s ground, Solitude. The group has studied peace walls, created an interactive map of them, and worked tirelessly to improve communication and prevent conflict across the “interface”, the city jargon for where Catholic and Protestant communities abut. McCallum and the small team are in touch by telephone with community workers on the loyalist side of the peace line, working constantly to defuse tensions, especially during the contentious summer marching season.

There have been some successes. In 2011, a “peace gate” was installed in the 3.5-meter-high corrugated iron fence that cuts through the tidy Victorian grounds of Alexandra Park. The foundations of that fence had been laid on 1 September 1994 – the day after the Provisional IRA announced a “complete cessation of military operations”.

Since opening, that “peace gate” has operated largely without incident. On a quiet weekday afternoon, dog walkers stroll from the Tiger’s Bay end, where Northern Irish flags fly from lampposts, to the republican Antrim Road, and vice versa. Nearby, a car turns down Newington Street. Until a few years ago, this was impossible: a steel gate, erected in the late 1980s following a spate of sectarian murders, barred the entrance to the nondescript row of terrace houses. Now the gate is open for most of the daytime: the hours have recently been extended.

Numerous other attempts to break down North Belfast’s defensive architecture, however, have run into the sand. Despite residents on both sides agreeing to a peace gate in the metal barrier that divides Flax Street, road authorities have refused to introduce expensive traffic-calming measures.

Even though segregation is estimated to cost Stormont £1.5bn a year, most of the funding for such “community relations” work comes from international donors, who are in the process of pulling out of Northern Ireland. “There is no momentum, there is no resources and the government haven’t provided a vision of a united community. They haven’t sold the benefits and opportunities” of taking down the peace walls, says McCallum. “We are in a situation where deadlines are constantly being put back, quite often because of an inability to secure the resources required.”

The peace walls were constructed, sometimes overnight, under anti-terrorism legislation. No formal mechanism exists for dismantling them. Lack of clear ownership – and legislative control – is compounded by the absence of clear guidelines for community agreement. A single resident’s opposition can be enough to maintain the status quo. “One voice can veto change for the many,” says NBIN’s Brendan Clarke.
Stormont is dominated by once-sworn enemies Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). There is little agreement about how to deal with the past, including peace walls. “There is no political need to build consensus,” says Norman Hamilton, a Presbyterian minister and member of the Community Relations Council.

Tensions between the parties threatened to bring down Stormont this summer, including the involvement of IRA members in the August murder of onetime republican gunman Kevin McGuigan. There have been ongoing anxieties over parades, with occasional incidents of violence. As I was sitting in the NBIN office, an email pinged into Clarke’s inbox. “There’s been a pipe bomb on the Oldpark Road.”

About a mile away, in West Belfast, on the opposite side of the peace line, shoppers on the Shankill Road pass storefronts selling mugs emblazoned with the Queen’s face. A mural depicts Belfast in its industrial heyday: Samson and Goliath, the iconic yellow cranes at Harland and Wolff. A little further down the street is another mural, this time in darker colours: two men bow their heads in honour of slain loyalist paramilitaries.

For four decades, an imposing, 800-metre-long, multilevel barrier has divided the loyalist Shankill and republican Falls Road. “The British Army started putting barbed wire to separate communities, then it was corrugated iron to separate communities, then brick walls that were added to and added to, even after the Good Friday Agreement,” says Ian McLaughlin of the Lower Shankill Community Association.

Men bow their heads in honour of slain loyalist paramilitaries on a mural lining the peace wall on Shankill Road in West Belfast. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
At the same time as barriers were going up between Catholics and Protestants, the decrepit terrace houses of the Shankill were being torn down. In 1961, more than 70,000 people lived in the area; now it’s fewer than 25,000. Most left for loyalist estates that ring the outskirts of the city. Similar movements took place across working-class Belfast. The result is that demand for housing is, in general, far higher in Catholic areas than Protestant.

“Catholics see peace walls as a problem to their community developing. For Protestants, peace walls protect their way of life, their bonfires, their flags,” says Byrne. “The question is, how do we create the conditions in which Protestants don’t see the removal of the wall as a threat to their existence as a community?”

McLaughlin, too, would like to see all the peace walls removed. “But reaching that point is a huge journey,” he says, particularly for Protestants who fear that their areas could go from orange to green almost overnight if the barriers were gone. Meanwhile, many unionist politicians fear that building new homes in Catholic neighbourhoods could dilute their electoral base.

“The difficulty in any peace wall conversation is that a lot of the initial conversations revolve around a sense of loss. What will I lose?’ asks McLaughlin, who has worked with republicans on the Falls area to improve access across the peace line.

The answer to Belfast’s peace wall conundrum lies in regeneration, says McLaughlin. A new housing development in the Shankill area is going up, after an agreement was reached with the local community. “Our core business at one time was peace-building, but now we have a dual approach – regenerating our community and building relations with our neighbours.”

But macro-political tensions can impinge on attempts to build relationships at street level. At Skegoneill Avenue in North Belfast, loyalist paramilitary flags fly from lamp-posts, even though the streets are mostly mixed and even include Belfast’s synagogue. In the shadow of an Ulster Volunteer Force, lettuce and spinach sprout in Peas Park, a community garden created by local residents. Chickens cluck happily beside a shipping container that has been turned into a shop.

“People just independently started doing stuff,” says Callie Persic, an ebullient American who came to Belfast 20 years ago for her PhD in anthropology and stayed. The garden is particularly popular with young people. In September, there is a harvest day with food, music and face painting.

Peas Park, however, has not escaped Belfast territoriality. Earlier this summer, a fence was erected around the garden. “People have been saying to us, ‘You must feel safer now there is a fence,’” says Persic. “But I felt like, why are we putting up a gate at an interface?”

GLASGOW, Scotland — “My mother was born in the Hebrides, in Stornoway, so that’s serious Scotland,” Donald Trump told an interviewer in 2010.

The U.S. presidential candidate has long made much of his Scottish roots. He likes Scotland so much that he chose Aberdeenshire as the location for a controversial £1 billion golfing complex.

But the plutocrat’s relationship with his adopted home has been a rocky one. The Scots appear to be turning on him in the wake of this week’s call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

The Herald, one of Scotland’s largest newspapers, carried a front page advert Tuesday for another of Trump’s Scottish golfing interests, at Turnberry. By Wednesday, almost all of Scotland’s political establishment, and even its universities, had made clear their disapproval of Trump’s latest outburst.

US tycoon Donald Trump (C) is escorted by Scottish pipers as he officially opens his new multi-million pound Trump International Golf Links course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, on July 10, 2012. Work on the course began in July 2010, four years after the plans were originally submitted. AFP PHOTO / Andy Buchanan (Photo credit should read Andy Buchanan/AFP/GettyImages)

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, announced she was withdrawing the U.S. mogul’s membership of GlobalScot, an international business network, with “immediate effect.”

Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen stripped Trump of an honorary degree awarded in 2010, describing his comments as “wholly incompatible” with its values.

The Scottish government’s International Development Minister Humza Yousaf, himself a Muslim, called Trump’s comments “hate speech” and warned that his proposed policy, if implemented, would transform the U.S. into an “apartheid state.”

By Wednesday, almost all of Scotland’s political establishment, and even its universities, had made clear their disapproval of Trump’s latest outburst.
Trump’s comments were “divisive, hateful and designed to cause division between communities,” Yousaf said.

Patrick Harvie, a Scottish Green MSP, lodged a motion at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, condemning Trump for comments which he said appear “increasingly fascist.”

“This bigoted blowhard of a man is being rightly condemned far and wide, and I’m confident that Scotland will reject his extremist rhetoric,” said Harvie, who had previously clashed with Trump over a proposed wind farm near the Aberdeenshire golf course.

In light of the Republican hopeful’s latest remarks, Harvie said he could not imagine any “self-respecting person wanting to spend money” in any of Trump’s business interests in Scotland.

Scottish ministers and Scottish National Party MPs urged Theresa May, the U.K. home secretary, to consider banning Trump from traveling to the U.K.

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, the SNP’s trade and investment spokeswoman at Westminster, said Trump should be barred for “hate preaching.”

“While we cannot control what he says on U.S. soil, we can demonstrate leadership in relation to this issue and say: Not in the United Kingdom do we want people making Islamophobic, racist, anti-Muslim remarks that are completely unfounded and unhelpful when we continue our fight against terrorism,” the Scottish MP, who is Muslim, said.

* * *
The Scottish government, and the Scottish National Party, have not always held Trump in such low esteem. Back in 2008, the Edinburgh administration stepped in when Aberdeenshire Council rejected Trump’s bid for planning permission for his £1 billion luxury golfing complex.

Construction of the sprawling development on the scenic Aberdeenshire coast went ahead in the face of vociferous local opposition.

In 2012, Michael Forbes, a farmer who refused to sell his land to Trump, won the Top Scot award at the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. Trump responded by calling the awards a “terrible embarrassment to Scotland.”

Forbes’ struggle with Trump became the centerpiece of an award-winning documentary by the name of “You’ve Been Trumped.”

Trump and then Scottish first minister and SNP leader Alex Salmond were on good terms, with the pair photographed together on a number of occasions. But the relationship turned sour after a decision was made to build 11 wind turbines near the golf course.

The Apprentice star went on to take out adverts comparing the development of wind farms to the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 259 passengers on board Pan Am Flight 103 and 11 residents of the Scottish town in 1989.

In June, an Edinburgh court dismissed Trump’s request for a public inquiry into what he says was the Scottish government’s unfair approval for the wind power project.

Trump’s investment in Aberdeenshire has so far been much less substantial than originally billed and he has repeatedly declined to say when he might start planned construction on a second golf course, hotel expansion and more than 2,000 holiday and residential homes.

Following the June judgement, Salmond, now MP for Gordon in Aberdeenshire, said he was “delighted by the decision of the highest court in Scotland to turn down Mr. Trump’s case.”

“The Trump organization has now been beaten twice in the Scottish courts and I hope that he will now accept the decision with good grace,” he said.

GLASGOW — At 6:30 a.m. on September 19 last year, Natalie McGarry sat alone on the pavement outside the glass-fronted Emirates Arena in this city’s East End. Inside, the counting of votes in Scotland’s independence referendum had ended a couple of hours earlier — Yes had won Glasgow but lost overall, by just over 10 points. Scotland would remain in the United Kingdom.

“I was the last person left in a very sad and lonely Emirates,” recalls McGarry, who spent months campaigning with Yes Scotland in the run-up to last year’s ballot. “I was devastated.”

McGarry’s despondency did not last long, however.

A few days after the vote, the then-33-year-old policy advisor was due to speak in Brussels, at a meeting of stateless nations from around the world. As she prepared her speech, the big story in Scotland moved from the 55/45 referendum result to the tens of thousands joining the pro-independence Scottish National Party.

“I had prepared to talk about this heartbreaking loss but instead I was talking about this huge new engagement in politics,” says McGarry.

* * *

A year on from the independence referendum, Scotland and its politics has “changed, changed utterly” — as former SNP leader Alex Salmond, paraphrasing W.B. Yeats, remarked in his resignation speech last year.

On September 18, 2014, the SNP’s rolls numbered just more than 25,000. Today the nationalists have more than 110,000 members — and, in May, increased their representation at Westminster from just six seats to 56, winning all but three Scottish constituencies.

“The political landscape across Scotland has changed completely,” says McGarry, who is now the SNP MP for Glasgow East, overturning a Labour majority of more than 10,000 to win with a swing of more than 32 percent on a greatly increased turnout, a post-referendum trend repeated across Scotland.

In May’s general election, the SNP managed to attract the support of the vast majority of the 1.6 million Yes votes, including many in traditional working class areas disillusioned at the inability of Labour governments to solve the problems that plague much of post-industrial Scotland. Polls put the nationalists on course to win an unprecedented third consecutive term in the devolved parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh next year.

“It is now self-evident to most Scots that decision-making should happen — on most issues — in Holyrood not in Westminster,” says Scottish political commentator Iain Macwhirter.

Although Scots voted No, the referendum hastened the unraveling of the Act of Union that joined Scotland and England in 1707, says Macwhirther.

“The independence referendum of 2014 was the most transformative political moment in Scotland in 300 years. It marked the beginning of the end of the Union of 1707, the consolidation of a distinct Scottish political culture, the end of Labour’s political dominance of Scotland.”

* * *

Alex Salmond previously declared last year’s vote a “once in a generation” opportunity. But, in the febrile arena of Scottish politics, a generation could prove as short as a few years.

Calls for another referendum are growing. Thousands of Scottish nationalists are due to rally in Glasgow this weekend.

Amid polls showing support for independence gaining strength, Scottish First Minister and SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon has come under pressure to include a commitment to a second referendum on the party’s manifesto for next year’s devolved elections.

A loose pledge on another vote is likely, but having built its success on a “gradualist” strategy, the SNP is unlikely to rush a second referendum. Sturgeon has said that a “material change” in Scotland’s constitutional position would trigger a ballot — if the U.K. votes to leave the European Union and Scots chose to remain, for example, or even the election of another Conservative government in 2020 with no mandate north of the border.

While British Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that he would not countenance another referendum, last year’s vote “will be the focal point of Scottish politics for the future and will continue to be until the next referendum,” says David Torrance, the biographer of both Salmond and Sturgeon.

Nationalists are highly unlikely to risk a second referendum until polls show a consistent support of at least 60 percent for leaving the U.K., but independence “is now the inescapable prism of politics” in Scotland says Torrance.

“Once things are framed in those terms [independence or the union], it is very hard to shift the focus back onto “normal” politics. That is reflected in the fact that the Scottish government doesn’t have that fantastic a record in areas like health and education but is wildly popular.

* * *

In 1995, then Labour Shadow Secretary for Scotland George Robertson predicted that “devolution will kill nationalism stone dead.” Two years later, Scots voted overwhelmingly for a devolved Parliament in Edinburgh — but far from ending demands for independence, the clamor to leave the United Kingdom has grown stronger in the almost two decades since.

Westminster has struggled to accommodate growing demands for Scottish self-determination. The cross-party pro-U.K. campaign during the independence referendum — so negative that it was nicknamed “Project Fear” — began with a commanding 40-point lead and ended up relying on last minute promises of fresh powers for the Scottish Parliament to secure victory.

The Smith Commission, established in the wake of last September’s vote, recommended more devolution, but for many nationalists the new levers proposed do not go far enough. Meanwhile, Conservative plans to introduce specific voting rights for English MPs in Westminster have drawn the SNP’s ire.

Adam Tomkins, professor of public law at Glasgow University and a Conservative candidate in next year’s Scottish elections, says that “the union isn’t going away anytime soon” but unionists need to make more of the benefits of the three centuries-old relationship between Scotland and England.

“People need to know what the union does for them. The union feels very abstract; it feels very distant from the life of, say, a working class man in Glasgow.”

Tomkins’ solution is two-fold: to nurture common cultural bounds across the border through proposals such as twinning pupils in English and Scottish schools; and to build an “architecture of shared rule” that would give Scots greater representation in the institutions of Whitehall and the British state.

“The ingredients that held the union in the 20th century are not going to be the ones that held the union together in the 21st century,” says Tomkins. “But some kind of replacement glue is going to be needed.”

* * *

Despite the SNP surge, victory for nationalists in a second referendum is not a given. The economic and political uncertainties that contributed so much to the Yes side’s defeat — particularly over what currency an independent Scotland would use — are no closer to conclusive answers.

Political developments elsewhere in Britain might also change the dynamic in Scotland. The SNP’s social democratic rhetoric has played well at the ballot box, but with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, Scottish nationalists could face a threat from the left.

“Corbyn is a huge black swan that has sailed into the middle of the constitutional debate. Suddenly, the SNP cannot claim to be the sole inheritor of social democratic politics in Scotland,” says Macwhirter.

“The nationalists have done very well by adopting all the policies — like free tuition fees, council housing, prescription charges — that Labour abandoned under Blair. But now Corbyn is coming along and reappropriating them, which is a fascinating development.”

BELFAST — So far, 2015 has hardly been a vintage summer in Northern Ireland — and not just on account of the unseasonably cold weather. In recent weeks this small corner of the United Kingdom has witnessed clashes between police and pro-union marching bands, and ongoing attacks against security forces by Irish republicans opposed to the peace process. Now the murder of a former IRA man, ostensibly by his onetime comrades, threatens to collapse Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government.

Northern Irish police have said that they believe members of the Provisional IRA were responsible for the killing of Kevin McGuigan in East Belfast earlier this month. The IRA was supposed to have “left the stage” 10 years ago when its weapons arsenal was decommissioned.

Northern Irish First Minister and Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson says Sinn Féin, the political voice of Irish republicanism, must be excluded from the power-sharing government at Stormont if IRA involvement in the murder is proven. On August 26, the smaller Ulster Unionist party announced that they would be resigning from the Executive.

British Secretary of State Theresa Villiers has been more circumspect, commenting that the continuing existence of the IRA “didn’t come as much of a surprise,” but that there was no evidence that the organization was involved in paramilitary activity.

The current crisis is the latest in a long line of disputes between Irish nationalists and pro-U.K. unionists in the devolved government that was set-up in Northern Ireland in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. That deal brought an end to the 30-year-long “Troubles” that cost more than 3,000 lives.

The once quotidian violence is gone, but this remains a deeply divided society. Belfast is among the most segregated cities in the world. Across the city, rival union flags and Irish tricolors denote separate Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

“People don’t hate each other, but Sinn Féin and the DUP hate each other” — Alex Kane, unionist political commentator
The state of play in government is little different.

Even before the McGuigan killing — believed to have been carried out in retaliation for the murder of another former IRA member in Belfast earlier this summer — nationalists and unionists were at loggerheads over proposed welfare cuts for the population of just under two million mandated by the British government in Westminster.

Sinn Fein says reductions in welfare payments would hurt the most vulnerable. Both major unionist parties, the Democratic Unionists (DUP) and the Ulster Unionists, warn that failure to do a deal would leave a £600 million (€825 million) hole in the Belfast Parliament’s budget. Northern Ireland receives an annual subvention of around £12 billion (€16.5 billion) from the U.K. Exchequer.

Earlier this summer, First Minister Robinson insisted that if no deal is struck on spending cuts he would ask the secretary of state to repatriate control of welfare policy back to Westminster. Such a move would probably lead to the collapse of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration — if it has not been toppled already by the aftershock of the McGuigan killing.

And yet, Belfast does not feel like a city that could soon be without a government.

“I walk around this town and people aren’t saying to me ‘the union is in danger.’ Nobody. People are more interested in jobs and health,” says Alex Kane, a unionist political commentator based in Belfast.

“But there is a general sense of despondency with the assembly. People don’t hate each other, but Sinn Féin and the DUP hate each other.”

* * *

This July marked the 10th anniversary of arguably the most important step in Northern Ireland’s road to peace — the decommissioning of the Provisional IRA’s huge stockpile of weapons. The republicans’ long campaign, which cost more than 1,800 lives, was supposedly over.

The cessation of widespread violence has not, however, meant the end of hostilities between nationalists and unionists. In Northern Ireland, von Clausewitz’s famous maxim is turned on its head: here, politics is war by other means. Clashes over putatively minor issues such as the Irish language provision and the routes for pro-union Orange Order parades are common.

“The Good Friday Agreement managed the end of the conflict. It didn’t give us a blueprint for normal politics,” says Jonny Byrne, lecturer in criminology at the University of Ulster. The past remains deeply contested by all sides. Politicians “have never resolved the fundamentals of the conflict,” says Byrne.

Northern Irish politics is characterized by “an inability to accept losses and gains through normal political mechanics.” Instead politicians of all stripes blame the British or Irish governments for failing to provide resources or solutions to local problems.

The drive for consensus in the peace process also begot a system prone to cronyism. Police are investigating claims that a Belfast law firm held £7 million (€9.6 million) in an offshore bank account for a local politician in a major property sale.

“The question is: When should you complain after 20 years that an absence of violence is not enough?” asks Byrne. “We should want more. We should aspire for more. This is not what we should settle for.”

“Paramilitaries are still active in the community” — Phil Hamilton, community worker
Northern Irish politics is still dominated by many of the same actors that trod the boards during the Troubles. Peter Robinson was elected DUP deputy leader in 1980. Five U.K. prime ministers have held office since Gerry Adams became Sinn Féin president.

“It feels like Cuba,” says Byrne. “Where is the opportunity for new thinking?”

While old stagers dominate party politics, on the street tensions have ratcheted up.

Alongside the union flags, paramilitary standards flutter in the breeze in many loyalist parts of Belfast. Illegal outfits such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force have been accused of recruiting new members. Earlier this summer a new loyalist terror group announced its presence.

On the other side of the sectarian divide, republican paramilitaries provided a “guard of honor” at a recent funeral in Derry. Claims of IRA involvement in the McGuigan killing have focused attention on the continuing existence of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. “Paramilitaries are still active in the community,” says Phil Hamilton, a community worker in Rathcoole, a huge Belfast housing estate where loyalist gunmen still look down menacingly from gable end murals.

“A return to the conflict isn’t on the radar but other people are filling the political vacuum,” says John Loughran, a Sinn Féin member who works with former prisoners from both sides of the conflict in North Belfast. The area is among the most economically deprived in the whole of the U.K.

Gridlock in Stormont is fuelling a wider sense of disillusionment with politics. In May’s general election, Northern Ireland registered the lowest turnout in the U.K.

“The good and proper institutions built into the Belfast Agreement are increasingly the very structures that are disenchanting the electorate,” says Norman Hamilton, a Presbyterian minister and member of the Community Relations Council. “This dissatisfaction is deep. We are tired of crisis.”

I meet Hamilton in a bright, airy shopping arcade in Belfast city center. The building was opened by then British Secretary of State Patrick Mayhew in 1992, an early sign of growing confidence that peace was finally coming to restive Northern Ireland.

More than 20 years later there is no sign of a return to the violence of the past. But even if Stormont survives the latest emergency, executive paralysis is eroding faith in the political process, warns Hamilton.

“If democracy cannot deliver stable government, given our history that’s not a good place to be.”

Chris Van Der Kuyl set up his first video game company in Dundee in the mid-1990s. “It was an industrial landscape,” he says of the city, which had been bled of heavy industry from the 1970s onwards. “Everything was closing, everyone was leaving.”

Van Der Kuyl’s 4J Studios would go on to help develop the global gaming sensation Minecraft; next year he will open a new digital headquarters on the city’s docks. “It’s not the V&A but it will cost a few million,” he laughs.

In its imperial heyday, Dundee was known as the city of “jute, jam and journalism”. Now, with the mills gone and the printing presses quieter, Scotland’s fourth city has a rather different claim to global fame: not just Minecraft but Grand Theft Auto and other classic video game titles were born or raised on the banks of the River Tay. What’s more, as Van Der Kuyl referred to, the only branch of the V&A museum outside London will open soon on the once-thriving docks.

Indeed, despite pockets of severe deprivation, Dundee’s story is that of a city increasingly defined by its culture and creativity. With a population of just 150,000, it was long seen as the black sheep of Scotland’s cities, languishing behind the architectural drama of Edinburgh and the wealth of Aberdeen, its post-industrial problems often overshadowed by those of much larger Glasgow. But this image is changing.

Some 3,000 people now work in Dundee’s creative economy, generating turnover of almost £200m. Last year, Dundee received the UK’s first Unesco City of Design award, fitting recognition for a city that gave the world everything from Aspirin and orange marmalade to ZX Spectrum. Publisher DC Thomsons are major employers here; an 8ft bronze statue of Dandy comic book hero Desperate Dan stands tall on the high street, his faithful mutt Dawg in tow.

The V&A at Dundee may be over budget – £80m and counting – and behind schedule, but it is expected to open in 2018. And actor Brian Cox is now backing a £120m project to bring a film studio to Dundee.

“What was a post-industrial city now has multiple indicators of inward investment,” says professor Paul Harris, dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. “There has been a massive transformation for the citizens of Dundee and their ambition.”

The Birmingham-born Harris “hated” Dundee when he arrived in 1991, to work in the local television industry. “The notion in ’91 of three cycle cafes and the V&A? You wouldn’t have believed it,” he says over coffee in an upmarket hotel by the docks. Nearby stand a phalanx of apartments with views over the Tay.

A couple of hundred metres away, along the river, a placard attached to plywood hoarding proclaims: “Your Waterfront Your Future”. Articulated lorries ferry earth from what will be the site of the V&A, located just next to where the RSS Discovery, the Dundee-built research ship used by Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica in 1901, is moored on the Tay. There are plans for a hotel, retail units and apartments, all part of an ambitious regeneration project to connect Dundee city centre to the water.

The decision to open the V&A at Dundee stemmed in large part from long established links between Duncan Jordanstone of College of Art and Design and the pater familias in Kensington. Similar links have been forged between Dundee’s universities and creative industries is many areas, notably gaming. In 1997, Abertay University created the world’s first degree in computer games technology. Today, Dundee is the heart of Scotland’s thriving gaming industry: Rockstar North, creators of Grand Theft Auto, may have since moved to Edinburgh, but there some 40 gaming firms based in Dundee.

Not all have multimillion-pound offices or household name titles. In an alcove in the roof of the Victorian-era City Chambers, a team of designers from a start-up called Spacebudgie is building an educational platform game. “We decided to form our own company rather than just getting jobs with other companies,” says designer Ronan Quigley, whose team are all recent Abertay graduates.

Spacebudgie share their enviable workspace – stained-glass windows, bare rafters, stickers that say “Fundee” dotted on walls – with a handful a small companies. They are part of the Fleet Collective, a community of artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs who work separately or collaborate on different projects. Desks are just £100 a month.

“In Dundee you have to make your own fun. You’re forced to do it yourself,” says Ed Broughton, a 37-year-old Londoner who runs the film outfit Bonnie Brae Productions at Fleet Collective. “It never really crossed my mind to set up a company before I came to Dundee.”

Dundee has made a virtue of its size. The local council convenes a quarterly Cultural Agencies Network, which meets to discuss strategy and concerns. A short walk from Fleet Collective is the impressive curved glass and steel building of Dundee Contemporary Arts. When the DCA was opened in 1999, on the site of an old garage that was being used as an impromptu skate park, the city had no real national cultural presence. Now the DCA boasts a print studio, cinema, gallery space, and one of the best cafes in town.

DCA director Clive Gillman says he looks ahead to the coming of the V&A but, like many in Dundee, mixes optimism with concerns about what he calls “irritable Bilbao syndrome”.

“We have to make the V&A work for the city. And we have to make the V&A work for us in the city,” says Gillman, who will soon take over as director of creative industries at Creative Scotland. “How do you make a massive institution like the V&A work within the context of the local strategy? That’s the really exciting thing. But that’s not easy either.”

The DCA has been widely praised for helping to transform the city’s cultural life. “Dundee Saved My Life” says a T-shirt on sale in the gift shop. “Across Europe there are hundreds, thousands, of small, post-industrial cities trying to understand what their future is. What Dundee has done is shape its future – partly by accident, partly by design, building on what was already here. This is a living experiment of what culture-led regeneration could look like,” says Gillman.

Every year, DCA buses in thousands of kids to attend screenings at the two-week Children’s Film festival. Local communities have long been at the heart of Dundee’s cultural strategy, but Gillman admits that reaching out remains “a fundamental challenge”.

The V&A will have to work hard to connect with the people of Dundee, too, not just the well-heeled visitors who will inevitably flock to it. Despite millions in outside investments, Dundee remains one of the most deprived places in Scotland. One in four children live in poverty. For many children growing up in places such as Lochee or Kirkton, lucrative careers as game designers or visual artists remain a distant dream.

There are significant economic barriers preventing poorer citizens from accessing Dundee’s cultural offerings, says Philip Howard, chief executive of Dundee Rep, the only repertory theatre left in the UK. Howard has worked hard to make Dundee Rep a more national, and indeed international, company. “But you have to offset that with wider, deeper and – crucially – more targeted work in the city.”

That includes taking plays out into Dundee’s small, closely knit communities. Each year, the Rep tours small venues across the city. The material started off relatively light with a collection of Alan Bennett monologues, but has progressed to plays about teenage pregnancy and social problems.

Anna Day, director of Literary Dundee, is all too aware of the “danger of polarisation” that can happen if a wealthy creative sector becomes disconnected from the city it inhabits. “It is about reaching these children at a young age and showing them how design and culture can change their lives,” says Day.

One attempt to do this is Comic School, a joint initiative between DC Thomson and the city’s universities. Due to open this year, it will host resident comic book artists who, in return for reduced rent in the building, will mentor young people. “We need to show people how (culture) can change their lives,” says Day.

Day grew up in Dundee, then left for London and a job on Fleet Street. She swore she would never return, but “then I came and saw how much was happening.” That was nine years ago. A shiny new museum, or a fleet of hipster office spaces, will not solve many of Dundee’s post-industrial problems, but Day believes something profound has changed. “The city is optimistic. How people feel about themselves has changed.”

Shetlanders are fond of saying that their nearest train station is the Norwegian city of Bergen, such is the islands’ distance from the British mainland. Perched on a rocky outcrop surrounded by the wild, oil-rich North Sea, the U.K.’s most northerly archipelago has a very distinctive history and identity.

But windswept Shetland — population circa 25,000 — has not escaped the political gale that blew across Scotland and the rest of Britain in the wake of last year’s defeated independence referendum.

In May’s general election, Shetland and Orkney was one of only three Scottish constituencies not to return a Scottish National Party MP. Incumbent Liberal Democrat Alastair Carmichael held on, by less than a thousand votes, as the SNP took 56 seats across Scotland.

The former Scottish secretary’s political future — and the future of his party in their last Scottish redoubt — now hangs in the balance.

Carmichael is under investigation by Westminster’s parliamentary standards commissioner after he admitted to approving the leak of a Whitehall memo suggesting SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon told a French diplomat she would like to see David Cameron remain as Prime Minister ahead of the general election. He had previously denied any involvement.

Recently passed legislation that allows the recall of MPs is not yet in force, but, if the commissioner finds against him, Carmichael’s position could become politically untenable. At the same time, a separate public petition crowd-funded over £55,000 to launch a legal challenge against the Lib Dem’s election victory. An Edinburgh court is expected to hear the case in September. Either outcome could result in a by-election.

Such political skullduggery is almost unheard of in the Shetland Islands.

“It’s not a particularly political place. People in Shetland just want to be left to get on with things,” says former BBC journalist Tom Morton over coffee in a busy café near the harbor at Lerwick, the Shetlands’ largest town.

Liberals have dominated Shetland politics for more than half a century. Jo Grimond, who first became MP in 1950, is still revered for brokering a deal with international oil companies in the early 1970s that saw the construction of a massive refinery at Sullom Voe under unusually favorable terms for the local community. Almost overnight, the impoverished fishing community was transformed into a prosperous mini-state with local control over its own oil fund.

“People in Shetland just want to be left to get on with things” — Tom Morton, former BBC journalist.

But the Liberal Democrats hemorrhaged support in May, and the Carmichael affair has sparked indignation among many in Shetland. More than once I was told that the MP had “brought shame” on the islands — not by leaking the “Frenchgate” memo, but by lying about it.

“The ordinary Liberals feel betrayed by what he did because they trusted him,” says Shetlander Mary Blance.

Even Tavish Scott, the sitting Liberal Democrat member of the devolved Scottish parliament for Shetland, admits that voters feel let down. But Scottish nationalists went over the top in their campaign to oust the MP, he says, adding: “I think it will rebound on the SNP.”

Scott and his party hope so — Shetland is one of just two Lib Dem constituencies to have survived the SNP tsunami in the 2011 Scottish elections. Polls suggest the nationalists could win almost every seat in Scotland next year. With the Lib Dems currently polling in the low single digits, the party needs all the support it can muster.

* * *
On a blustery summer’s evening on Lerwick harbor, a brass band decked out in British Legion livery plays to a small crowd. The event commemorates more than 250 men who left the islands a century ago to fight in World War I. Many never returned.

As the band plays, a Shetland flag swirls in the breeze. The ubiquitous standard — the colors of the Scottish saltire in the form of a Nordic cross — reflects the islands’ own complex ties.

The islands were under Norwegian control for centuries. In 1468, the King of Denmark pawned Shetland, along with Orkney, to Scotland as part of a dowry for a royal marriage. The Danes never managed to repay the debt.

The Act of Union brought the Shetlands into the United Kingdom, but traces of the Viking heritage remain: St Magnus, St Olaf and King Harald are among the names of Lerwick’s pretty Victorian streets. Udal law, an ancient Norse legal system, still holds sway in the Shetlands’ courts. Solid Scandinavian-style timber houses are dotted across the islands.

With such a rich history, identity is a particularly thorny issue, says Shetlands-born writer Malachy Tallack.

“Most people would say they are Shetland first. Most people would say they are Scottish too, and probably British. There is no contradiction.”

Although a short-lived movement for greater autonomy emerged after the discovery of oil, the Shetlands have long been stony soil for Scottish nationalism. In 1979, the Shetlands voted against Scottish devolution. In the 2010 general election, the SNP finished a massive 41.4 percent behind the Lib Dems here.

But Shetlanders’ antipathy towards the nationalists seems to be softening.

Last September, the pro-independence vote was lower in Shetland than the national average but, at more than 36 percent, was still significant, says Tallack. “Ten years ago you wouldn’t have found 5 to 10 percent who would have voted yes.”

Since the referendum, the SNP’s membership in Shetland has risen more than five-fold.

“You can’t afford to buy a house in Shetland. You can’t afford to rent a room” — Ella Gordon, textile maker.
Often accused of centralizing power, the Scottish nationalist government in Edinburgh has set out a new agenda for the islands, promising more local powers and appointing Scotland’s first dedicated islands’ minister. This approach is proving popular in Shetland, says Mike MacKenzie, an SNP member of the Scottish Parliament for the Highlands and Islands.

“In the past they have felt neglected by the Scottish government (and) by the SNP. That has changed,” says MacKenzie. “I’ve been warmly received. That’s partly the natural island hospitality but also we’ve been taking a pretty good message to the island.”

Shetland News journalist Neil Riddell agrees. “People always say, ‘We are as remote from Edinburgh as we are from London,’ but that isn’t strictly true. We have much more access to Scottish ministers. Before devolution there was just one U.K. minister for the whole of Scotland.”

Ostensibly Shetland has done well from the union. Oil has paid for a road network that is the envy of rural Scotland. Even small hamlets have heated swimming pools and leisure centers. Lerwick boasts both a state-of-the-art performance space and a museum that rivals those of many larger nations.

Meanwhile, a massive gas plant is being built at Sullom Voe. Many of the workers live in huge, static ocean-liners moored in Lerwick and Scalloway.

Some Shetlanders, however, question whether this so-called “second oil boom” is benefiting their community. Beyond the bar owners and the hoteliers, there is little sign of oil money trickling down. House prices have risen sharply, and a new generation of locals find themselves forced to leave.

“You can’t afford to buy a house in Shetland. You can’t afford to rent a room. A friend of mine was renting a one bedroom flat for £900 a month,” says Ella Gordon. The 24-year-old textile-maker lives with her parents.

Most of her friends now live in Edinburgh or Glasgow, hundreds of miles, and an expensive day’s journey, away. “Growing up in the 90s we had it so good. We could do anything we wanted. Now it’s like life is going backwards.”

It’s a bank holiday Monday afternoon in a Glasgow boozer. Busy tables are littered with discarded yellow raffle tickets and half-empty pints. On the small stage, a heavily pregnant woman belts out Purple Rain.

Bob Gillespie stands by the entrance, shoulders filling out a tweed jacket, silently mouthing Prince’s words. The 77-year-old passed his love of a singalong on to his son, the raucous Primal Scream frontman who bears his name. In a gap between numbers, a middle-aged woman with tightly pursed lips stops for a chat. “Don’t worry, I can help,” Gillespie says in a low, gravelly voice, flicking a hand through his white hair. She smiles, reassured.

In his native city, Bob Gillespie’s reputation goes before him. He is the union firebrand who took on Robert Maxwell. He is also probably the most famous Labour MP that Glasgow never had, the man whose defeat in a supposedly unlosable 1988 byelection in Govan was a watershed moment for Scotland, and Scottish nationalism.

Outside the bar, the street is bathed in sunshine, illuminating a series of bright blue posters tacked up in the windows of a council flat. All say just one word: “Yes.” Glasgow voted for independence last year. Now Labour seems set to lose dozens of Westminster seats in its onetime heartlands to the Scottish National party. If anyone knows what that feels like, it’s Bob Gillespie.

In 1988 it was no summer of love in the shadows of the shipyards on the southern lip of Glasgow’s Clyde. Rangers had finished a lowly third in the league, behind bitter rivals Celtic. Margaret Thatcher was in the process of denationalising British Shipbuilders. Govan’s Fairfield yard would soon be sold off. That July, Labour leader Neil Kinnock nominated Govan MP Bruce Millan as a European Commissioner. The ensuing byelection would be a formality. In the previous year’s general election, Labour won a record victory in Scotland, returning 50 MPs. Millan took more than five times the vote of his nearest challenger in Govan. Scottish nationalists finished a distant fourth.

Labour chose Gillespie as its candidate. Gillespie, a vivacious product of Glasgow’s docks, seemed a neat fit with working-class Govan. After returning from the navy with “Hong Kong” tattooed on his knuckles – a memento of a drunken escapade in the entrepot – Gillespie had built a formidable union career. By 1988, he was negotiating with print bosses across the UK.

But it soon became apparent that Govan would not be as straightforward as the Labour hierarchy assumed. Labour was slumping in the polls. The self-styled “fighting fifty” Scottish Labour MPs elected in 1987 were powerless in Tory-controlled Westminster. Split on the issue of a devolved Scottish parliament, the party was equally divided about how to respond to the poll tax. The newly minted levy was to be implemented in Scotland first before being rolled out across the UK. Labour rejected proposals for mass non-payment. The Scottish National party saw its chance.

“Our strategy in Govan was absolutely clear, to pin the Labour party on two points: they didn’t know what to do about the poll tax and they weren’t the party they were,” recalls Jim Sillars, the SNP’s candidate and himself a former Labour MP.

The SNP had form in Govan. In 1973, a glamorous 30-year-old publican named Margo MacDonald – nicknamed “the blonde bombshell” by an enraptured press corps – overturned a massive Labour majority to win a historic nationalist victory. By 1988, Sillars and MacDonald were husband and wife.

But the political landscape in Govan had shifted in the decade and a half since MacDonald had shocked the Labour establishment. The defiant radicalism of Jimmy Reid and the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders was a fading memory. The SNP was openly loathed, blamed for ushering Thatcher into power after its support for a no-confidence motion precipitated the collapse of the James Callaghan administration in 1979.

“We were despised,” says Sillars, leaning back on a tan easy chair in his ground-floor flat on Edinburgh’s southside. Near his slippered feet lie copies of Marx’s Capital, biographies of Hitler and Stalin, and Alex Salmond’s recent referendum campaign diary.

Initially, the SNP’s aims in Govan were timorous. Reduce the Labour majority to a few thousand. Give the party a scare. But as the short byelection campaign began, the mood changed. Nationalists descended upon Govan. More than 500 turned out to canvass in one day alone. Sillars’s call to refuse to pay the poll tax chimed with an angry electorate. A Labour press officer drafted from London for the campaign later recalled the Proclaimers “driving round Govan on the back of a flatbed truck urging everyone to kick Labour where it hurt”.

Bob Gillespie was struggling. Local Labour party membership numbered just 170. Many were of retirement age. Mirror Group owner Robert Maxwell used his titles – notably the influential and traditionally Labour-leaning Daily Record – to launch withering attacks on his union nemesis.

“Maxwell always put gagging orders on people. He would never have been able to do that if you only spoke as an MP in the Palace of Westminster. So he went after me,” says Gillespie, with a rueful shake of his head. He offered to stand down. Kinnock would not hear of it: “He said: ‘You just have to do the best you can and I’ll have a go at Maxwell.’” The Labour leader would regret not heeding the warning.

Days before the byelection, Gillespie floundered in a live debate on Scottish Television when asked a question about subsidiarity in the European Union. “Bob didn’t want to show his ignorance,” recalls Sillars. “He got so distracted trying to answer that he knocked over the microphone. That television debate was a disaster for Bob. So it was good for us.”

On 10 November 1988, two days after George HW Bush was elected US president, Govan went to the polls. Jim Sillars appeared on the ballot paper as “SNP Anti-Poll Tax Candidate”. He won a majority of 3,554 on a massive 33% swing.

A BBC exit poll showed that 32% of Govan voters thought “representing Scotland’s interests” was the most important issue, followed by 21% citing the poll tax. More than half rated the performance of Scotland’s Labour MPs as “poor” or “very poor”. In London, Tony Benn took to his diary. The Govan defeat, he wrote, was “a reflection of our failure to discuss constitutional questions, which are at the core of the devolution argument”.

I think I did more good for the children in Chernobyl. I thought: ‘God works in mysterious ways.’

Bob Gillespie is a talkative man but he grows quiet, even sullen, when asked about what happened in 1988. “I don’t feel anything about it at all,” he says, cradling a can of sugar-free Irn Bru. “That was only six weeks, seven weeks of my life. I went back to work.” Gillespie never stood for public office again. After Govan, he raised over £1m for victims of Chernobyl. Dozens of Belarusian children were brought to a convalescing home in Ayr. “I think I did more good for the children in Chernobyl. I thought: ‘God works in mysterious ways.’”

Labour subsequently tried to blame Gillespie for his loss. Selection rules were tightened. But some close to the Govan campaign complained they were hamstrung by “the shambolic organisational abilities of those sent up from London”.

Govan 1988 changed Scottish politics, and Scotland. Although Sillars lost the seat at the next general election, he believes his victory put the nationalists back on the political map. “It ended the period of vicious animosity among people towards the SNP. We were back with some credibility.” In the wake of its Govan defeat, Labour finally decided to join the constitutional convention, paving the way for devolution in 1997.

Ten years later, the SNP won its first elections to the Edinburgh parliament. Now the nationalists stand on the verge of unprecedented general election success. The SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon has energised the nation. As a teenager, the future first minister had a poster of Jim Sillars on her wall. Govan 1988 was her very first political campaign.

The problems that plagued Labour in Glasgow more than two and a half decades ago are even worse now. The traditional party of industrial Scotland lacks members, drive and momentum. Gillespie, however, is still unflinching in his support. He campaigned against independence last year. Gillespie’s photograph appears on local Labour party election leaflets. He is smiling, his beloved bichon frise Pepe in his arms.

These days, however, Bob Gillespie spends more time surrounded by music than politics. “I’ve always loved music,” he says. In the 1960s, he ran a Glasgow folk club. Billy Connolly was a floor singer. (“He was never a singer, never.”) His son, Bobby Jr, used to lie awake at night listening as the Rolling Stones, Dylan and Muddy Waters spun on the turntable at the parties his parents threw in their council house.

The Primal Scream singer has credited his father with introducing him to rock’n’roll and socialism. “My dad was an activist, he was a trade unionist and he was a Marxist and he was always involved in that struggle and it took up his life,” he said in 2013.

Today, Jim Sillars is on the fringes of the SNP. His wife, Margo, died just months before the referendum. In his spare time he tutors novice SNP general election candidates, including Mhairi Black, the 20-year-old student whose audacious bid to unseat Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander in Paisley has unmistakable echoes of Sillars’ win in Govan.

In 1988, there were only a handful of SNP-Labour marginals. Last month, the Electoral Reform Society classified all seats in Scotland not held by the SNP as marginal. Now there are Govans right across the country.

Around midnight on July 11, 1995, word reached Srebrenica that Dutch peacekeepers had abandoned their observation posts on the outskirts of town.

The soldiers had arrived in the Eastern Bosnian “safe haven” just over two years earlier, ostensibly to provide a buffer between local Bosniak Muslims and encircling Bosnian Serb forces.

When 19-year-old Hasan Hasanovic heard that the United Nations troops had retreated to their base he knew he had two choices: escape or die.

“I decided to flee through the forest with my father and my brother trying to survive,” says Hasanovic in flawless, clipped English.

He had bartered sugar for English lessons from a local teacher during the three-year-long siege of Srebrenica that ended in July 1995, in the largest act of mass murder on European soil since the Second World War.

Twenty years later Hasanovic works at the Srebrenica Memorial centre, a small museum attached to the sprawling battery factory that once housed the Dutch contingent.

Everyday Hasanovic recounts the same terrible story, nervously turning his wedding ring around his finger as he describes that hot July night when he set off with some 15,000 men to walk more than sixty miles through thick forest to the nearest Bosniak-held town, Tuzla.

The ad hoc human column gathered around six miles outside Srebrenica.

When they started to move Bosnian Serb army units on the overhanging hills began shooting indiscriminately. Hasan Hasanovic was among the crowd pushing forward in panic, desperate to escape the hail of bullets. “I lost sight of my father and my twin brother. Since then I have never seen them,” he told me.

Hasanovic kept walking. A man offered him sugar and water, which he hungrily accepted. The further they walked, the less the men looked at each other, fearful of seeing death etched in one another’s faces.

The following day, around forty miles from Tuzla, they came to rest on a hillside. They had been walking for hours. Some kicked off their shoes, others closed their eyes. Then gunfire ripped through the air.

A thousand men were killed in a matter of moments. Hasanovic managed to break away, seeking shelter in the forest. Below, Serb voices on loudspeakers promised food and safety. Those who surrendered were killed.

Hasanovic walked on. The rubber boots and the hours of wading through streams and forests tore the skin off the soles of his feet. More than once he narrowly escaped Serb militiamen.

“On July 16, after days and nights of being hunted like animals, we reached Tuzla,” he says. The tall chimneys of the industrial city framed a makeshift refugee camp.

The field of white tents seemed to go on forever. People flocked to Hasanovic when they heard he had come from Srebrenica. Had they seen their son, their uncle, their father?

Each time he shook his head dolefully.

Amidst the crowd he spotted his mother, his younger brother and his grandparents. They gripped each other tightly. But there was no sign of his father or his brother.

Of the 15,000 men who set off on the “Death March”, only 3,500 survived. The fate that awaited those that remained in Srebrenica was, if anything, even worse.

Although just a few miles from the Serbian border, Srebrenica had long been a predominantly Bosniak area.

When war broke out, in April 1992, after Bosnia declared its independence, the town’s population swelled as Muslims in the surrounding villages fled the Bosnian Serb offensive to carve out a state of their own from the ashes of the disintegrating Yugoslavia.

Within months some 65,000 refugees had sought refugee in Srebrenica, more than doubling its prewar population.

The Srebrenica enclave was an easy target for the Bosnian Serb army. Attacks were frequent. On April 12 1993, artillery fire hit a school playground. Seventy-four were killed and over a hundred wounded.

Four days later, the United Nations declared the establishment of a “safe haven”.

Life was hard – food was scarce – but the arriving peacekeepers offered protection from the Bosnian Serb forces. Bosniaks gave up their weapons. Fatefully, they were promised they would not need them.

It was beyond our contemplation that the United Nations would betray the people of SrebrenicaHasan Hasanovic

“Everyone had the feeling that they lived in a big concentration camp,” Hasan Hasanovic recalls. “But people were still happy to have anything, to survive. It was beyond our contemplation that the United Nations would betray the people of Srebrenica.”

Srebrenica occupied a crucial strategic position. Without it, the Bosnian Serb dream of creating an ethnically pure state would be stymied. In early 1995, the attacks intensified. Hasanovic’s school was closed again. “Something wrong was coming. People could feel that there was evil in the air.”

This “evil” arrived in early July 1995. The shelling of Srebrenica got worse, much worse. Dutch troops retreated in the face of the Serb offensive.

United Nations commanders initially refused their requests for airstrikes against Serb positions. By the time they relented – dropping just two bombs – Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic had taken peacekeepers hostage.

There would be no full-scale attack on the Bosnian Serb lines. Emboldened by the success, Radovan Karadžić, President of the Serb Republic, ordered his forces to take the town.

In Srebrenica, people began to flee. Almost all able-bodied men began the “Death March”. More than 20,000 sought refugee at the UN compound at Potocari a few miles outside the town.

On July 12, Mladic walked through Srebrenica, handing out sweets to children and mugging for watching television cameras. “No matter if you’re old or young you’ll get transport,” he said. “Don’t be afraid – women and children first.”

The Serb army began separating all men aged 12 to 77, putting them onto buses. At Potocari, Dutch soldiers expelled the Bosniaks sheltering in their base, leading them directly into the hands of the waiting Bosnian Serb military.

Over the next four days, Mladic’s forces killed more than 8,000 men, in Srebrenica.

In a brutal, systematic massacre, victims were shot and clubbed to death in fields and behind houses, in warehouses and abandoned buildings.

Recently released documents suggest the involvement of Greek and Russian far-right fighters in the slaughter.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Bosnian Serbs committed genocide at Srebrenica.

Srebrenica changed the course of the Bosnian war. NATO’s subsequent intervention led to the Dayton peace agreement in December 1995.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was effectively divided into two, between the Croat-Bosniak Federation and “Republika Srpska”. Srebrenica became part of the new Serb Republic.

It took Hasanovic years to find out what happened to his family.

In 2003, his father joined the rows and rows of brilliant white marble headstones at the Potocari graveyard, across the road from the former Dutch base. “In 2005 I buried my twin brother which was the hardest thing in my life.”

Wall of names at the Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica.

MICHAEL BÜKER

A skull missing a mandible sits bolt upright on a stainless steel mortuary slab. Scattered around the head are fragments of bone shaped into a skeletal form. A few ribs, a fibula, two tibias, a handful of fingers. A humidifier hums in the corner.

On the opposite wall, a poster begs “Help Identify Your Loved Ones. Give Your Blood Sample”. The message is written in Bosnian and English.

This small office, in a nondescript business park on the outskirts of Tuzla, is the forensic laboratory of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). Funded by international donors, the ICMP was founded at the behest of Bill Clinton at the G-7 summit in 1996.

The commission task was to bring order to the chaos of war by assisting formerly hostile Balkan governments identify and trace some of the 40,000 people missing at end of the Yugoslav wars.

Around 70 per cent of those missing were from Bosnia. In Srebrenica and elsewhere, Bosnian Serb forces used bulldozers to push bodies into unmarked mass graves, which were subsequently exhumed, sometimes multiple times, to hinder identification. Consequently forensic scientists were regularly faced with the kind of scattered remains lying on the Tuzla mortuary table of tenacious Serbian forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic.

“When they removed those skeletal remains, often with big trucks, they destroyed the integrity of individuals so very often we don’t find complete bodies, maybe only in 10 per cent of cases,” Vucetic told me.

In the first five years, the ICMP identified just 140 Srebrenica victims, mainly through clothing and body parts. “We had to find another method for investigation. So we made a DNA lab,” says Vucetic.

Blood was collected from tens of thousands of Bosnians, both in the Balkans and across Europe where they had fled as refugees. Within months of the DNA lab opening in 2001, the ICMP had its first positive match. By the close of the following year, it had over 500 more. So far ICMP has identified over 85 per cent of those who died in Srebrenica.

Most victims are buried in the cemetery at Potocari, often during the annual July 11 commemoration.

The process of identification is arduous. Bone samples from victims are taken for DNA testing and matched with profiles on the ICMP database. “We don’t test each bone because that is very expensive. We only test one bone from each sample or each body part,” Vucetic explains as she lifts the heavy door that leads into the cold storage unit. Inside, shelves are lined with the remains of Srebrenica victims, thick plastic body bags on the lower rungs, brown paper bags for clothes and personal possessions above them.

The room has a pungent smell of raw flesh. It reminds me of a long forgotten summer job in a meat factory.

Scattered among the body bags are the remains of 300 individuals awaiting identification. The burden of proof is heavy.

Courts require that DNA matches are 99.95 per cent probability or above. Once a body has been formally identified it is pronounced dead. Family members are contacted.

The ICMP facility is open to the public but they are discouraged from coming to see the remains. “It is very emotional for them to see skeletons. Usually they expect that they will see something else. After 20 years it is still stressful when they come here and see bones,” says Vucetic.

Despite the ICMP’s efforts, almost a thousand people are still missing. It is “most likely” that there is another, so far untraced, mass grave lying amid the verdant Bosnian countryside, says Edin Jasaragic, who works at the ICMP’s main administrative centre, in an old basketball stadium in downtown Tuzla.

Some of those who survived the “Death March” from Srebrenica were inside this austere, Communist-era concrete building. The hard plastic windows are still riddled with bullet holes. On the ground floor, there is a shop that specialises in prosthetic legs. Landmines kill around 20 Bosnians every year.

As well as identifying victims, the ICMP has played a key role in criminal prosecutions. So far 46 individuals have been put on trial at Bosnian state courts for their role in the Srebrenica massacre, including 38 people charged with genocide.

The ICMP’s forensic evidence has also been crucial in the 21 trials related to Srebrenica at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, among them Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladic.

Despite these successes, justice has been “very slow” says Muhamed Durakovic, a Srebrenica survivor who now works for the ICMP in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. “There are hundreds of people roaming the streets of Srebrenica who are war criminals.”

Someone who took away your child is now working as a police officer or a public official in Srebrenica.Dragana Vucetic

Nevertheless, the ICMP is one of the few genuine success stories to emerge from the impoverished, fissiparous post-war Western Balkans states. Their innovative DNA approach has been exported around the world, helping to identify victims of natural disasters and political violence everywhere from the United States and the Philippines to Chile and Iraq.

“The ICMP has learned a lot in Bosnia over the past twenty years, it has a pool of experts that can deploy anywhere in the world to assist in cases of disaster or war, any time a government needs to identify a large number of individuals” says Muhamed Durakovic, who until recently was stationed in Libya.

Since the ICMP opened, the crucible of human suffering has shifted, to Ukraine, to Syria and numerous other conflagrations.

Silently, Bosnia and Herzegovina, a comparatively small conflict in a relatively unimportant part of the world, has slipped down the international community’s list of priorities.

The ICMP is due to follow the diplomats next year, moving its main operations out of Bosnia. The impecunious Bosnian government is unlikely to step into the breach to fund expensive DNA laboratories.

In a grim irony, the facilities at Tuzla are only likely to remain open if another mass grave is discovered at Srebrenica.

In the 1970s, the Yugoslav government released a promotional video to encourage people to move to the spa town of Srebrenica. Grainy footage shows a gym filled with healthy Bosnians. There is no distinction made between Bosniak Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats.

The streets, bounded by tree-lined escarpments, are neat and well tended. It looks for all world like a socialist paradise.

Srebrenica today is a very different place. The once modern apartment blocks are crumbling. Overgrown branches hang across the main thoroughfare. The red, blue and white Serbian tricolour of the Republika Srpska flag hangs limply from a municipal building.

As we drive slowly through town a table full of middle-aged men outside a bar all turn in unison to stare. Srebrenica, on the way to nowhere, is now a by-word for our darkest instincts.

The white minaret of the local mosque still looks down over Srebrenica. Before the war, the vast majority of the town’s 36,000-strong population were Bosniak. Now Srebrenica and the surrounding villages is overwhelmingly Serb.

Some Muslims, however, did take up the option of returning to their former homes afforded under the Dayton agreement, even if it meant living cheek-by-jowl with the men who murdered their loved ones.

In 2002, Hatidža Mehmedović came back to Srebrenica. Her family home had been burned down. Her husband and two sons had been killed. But she was determined to return. “We came here for one reason only, to live with our memories,” Hatidža Mehmedović tells me when we meet under the shade of a large wooden gazebo in the graveyard for Srebrenica genocide victims at Potocari.

Her family’s remains, identified by the ICMP in 2010, are buried nearby.

“They killed everything I had in this world. These are wounds that will never heel,” says Mehmedović, who wears a white headscarf. “This is not a life. This is hell. We returnees, we lost everything.”

Mehmedović is president of Mothers of Srebrenica, an association that represents victims of the massacre. “Many mothers have been left without joy. Our hearts are cold. We will never live to see how it is to see your sons marry. We will never have the joy of holding our grandchildren on our knee, thanks to the United Nations and the great powers.”

The Mothers of Srebrenica launched a legal case against the Dutch peacekeeping forces, arguing that they did not do enough to protect the people in their charge. Last year, a district court in The Hague ruled that the Netherlands is liable for the deaths of more than 300 Bosniak men and boys expelled from the UN base in July 1995.

The onetime Dutch military compound still stands at Potocari, across the road from the field filled with slender white gravestones. The Mothers of Srebrenica and others hope to eventually create a huge memorial on the site of the base, but for now it largely stands empty. I climb through an open window into what were once the soldiers’ quarters.

On the walls are crude drawings of naked women and Dutch phrases, untouched in twenty years. In one scrawling, just below a naked couple in bondage gear, there is red heart pierced by an arrow, slowly bleeding.

Graffiti left behind by Dutch Soldiers

MARTIJN MUNNEKE

On July 11, the annual commemoration for the victims of Srebrenica is held at Potocari. This year’s 20th anniversary service was thrown into doubt after Naser Oric, a wartime Bosniak leader in Srebrenica, was arrested in Switzerland.

Oric, a former bodyguard of notorious Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, is accused of war crimes against local Serbs. The Srebrenica organising committee said the event would be postponed until Oric’s release.

Last week, Swiss authorities announced that Oric would be extradited, but to Bosnia rather than Serbia. The decision caused uproar. Mladen Ivanic, who represents Serbs in Bosnia’s unwieldy tripartite presidency, said he would not be attending the Srebrenica commemoration “in this atmosphere”.

The political wrangling “is setting Bosnia-Herzegovina back to the state of war”, Ivanic added. Serbian president Tomislav Nikolic’s visit to Sarajevo has been cancelled.

Republika Srpska’s president Milorad Dodik went even further. Last week, the pugnacious Bosnian Serb leader, called the Srebrenica massacre ““the greatest deception of the 20th century”.

Previously Dodik, who has ruled Republika Srpska almost unopposed for a decade, has said that, “if a genocide happened, then it was committed against Serb people of this region, where women, children and the elderly were killed en masse.”

Such denial of what happened at Srebrenica, and across Bosnia, runs deep. “Srebrenica hoax” is a popular search term on Google.

Videos on YouTube promise the “real” story of what happened in July 1995, often using language and arguments familiar to Holocaust deniers.

“It is always very difficult to hear stories of denial when we all know what happened, especially those of us who were eyewitnesses to the atrocities and the killings,” says Srebrenica survivor Muhamed Durakovic. “We know what happened to these people. We have seen and witnessed their executions.”

Near Srebrenica, Bosnian Serbs recently put up anti-European Union posters on a warehouse where Bosniaks were killed in protest at a leaked draft United Nations resolution that suggests July 11 should be a memorial day. The resolution, penned by the UK, was vetoed at the UN this week by Russia.

Arguments over Srebrenica are symptomatic of the “polarised” nature of contemporary Bosnia, says Srecko Latal, a Sarajevo-based analyst with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. “This country, this entire region, never initiated its reconciliation process.”

The various international courts established to deal with war crimes in the former Yugoslavia focused too much on legalistic definitions and not enough on building bridges on the ground, says Latal.

The Dayton peace accords created an awkward state structure in which the three ethnic blocs – Bosniak, Serb and Croat – all have effective veto.

In the two decades since the fighting stopped, the recent past has become a political tool, pushing competing ethnicities further and further apart.

“This country is ethnically cleansed,” says Latal. “You don’t have any ethnic mixing anymore in big towns. In schools a majority are mono-ethnic. Kids learn about other ethnic groups from the media and history books and they are all tainted.”

Srebrenica, although fading from many Western memories, still has a resonance beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina’s contested borders.

Less familiar are the countless other massacres: over 5,000, mainly Bosniaks and Croats, were killed in Prijedor in 1992 alone; that same year 3,000 went to their deaths in the eastern town of Visegrad, some of them thrown alive from the town’s bridge; in Zvornik a further 2,000 were killed. The vast majority of this “ethnic cleansing” took place in what is now Republika Srpska.

Last spring, I visited a village called Carakovo, a few miles outside Prijedor in northwestern Bosnia. Before the war, Carakovo’s population was 1,200. Now it is 300.

The only thing that is growing is the graveyard, as more remains are identified and more mass graves discovered. “I feel like the last Mohican here,” Sudbin Music, a community worker who miraculously survived the Serb death camps, told me. “I ask myself, ‘What are you doing? Are you waiting for the next disaster?”

Elmina Kulasić was just a child when she was forced to leave the nearby town of Kozarac. After growing up in Chicago, Kulasić came back to Bosnia three years ago to work with other “returnees”.

The policy of re-settling people in their former homes has been a “failure”, she says. Only a fraction of those who left during the war have returned. “Everyone is ignoring survivors.”

Instead survivors of Bosnia’s vicious war are often used as political footballs.

On July 11, Bosniak politicians will line up with international diplomats and foreign correspondents in the VIP section at the cemetery in Potocari. Afterwards they will make speeches promising “never again.” Then, when the television cameras have stopped rolling, they will get back in their expensive cars, leaving Srebrenica, and its now childless mothers, until next year.

Dayton ended the war but bequeathed a labyrinthine political system structurally disposed to gridlock and stasis. Corruption in Bosnia is rife, according to Transparency International. Political tensions have increased. Dodik regularly threatens Republika Srpska’s secession, potentially splintering Bosnia. Croat politicians agitate for the creation of a “third entity”, centred on Herzegovina with a capital in Mostar. Bosniaks look east for patronage, to Turkey and the Gulf states.

“The political, economic and social situation has got worse since the war,” says Srecko Latal. Meanwhile, the international community has largely switched off. “The European Union is still ignoring that part, if not all, of the Balkans is a boiling powder keg once again.”

Last February, Bosnia did erupt – but not along ethnic lines. Tens of thousands took to the streets demanding jobs, higher wages and a better future. The municipality headquarters in Sarajevo was set alight, as was a government building in Tuzla.

The protests eventually petered out, but the frustrations that underlined them have not. Bosnia’s official unemployment rate is over 40 per cent, even higher among the young.

Average monthly salaries are less than €400. “There is not much hope here,” says journalist Nidzara Ahmetasevic, who lived in Sarajevo throughout the three and a half year long siege of the city.

“During the war it was easier than now. It was simpler. It was a war. They were shooting 24-7. You were scared. You lived like an animal but it was easier. Now you feel all the time under pressure. You feel like you are going to explode but nothing is exploding.”

Resad Trbonja was just 19 when he swapped his Converse trainers and Levi’s t-shirt for a Bosnian army uniform and a place on the frontline defending his native Sarajevo. More than two decades later, he is pessimistic about the future of the country he took up arms to defend.

“We are not going in the direction I was fighting for,” he says. “I didn’t fight for a Muslim country. I fought for Bosnia and Herzegovina, for all its citizens regardless of their faith. I wasn’t prepared for this ethnic division.”

Back at Potocari, a Bosnian state police car is permanently stationed outside the graveyard. On a warm summer’s afternoon there seems little need for such measures. Shirtless workmen toil in the fields beside empty roads. The air filled with the smell of freshly mown grass. Birds sing in the trees.

This idyllic scene belies the political reality. Srebrenica now belongs to Republika Srpska, a state-within-a state whose leaders continue to deny what happened two decades ago. “It is a big hypocrisy that this part of Bosnia where the genocide happened belongs to Republika Srpska,” says Hasan Hasanovic, as a group of Bosnian schoolchildren walk through the Srebrenica memorial. Many are crying.

Six years ago, Hasanovic returned from Tuzla. He now lives in Srebrenica with his wife and young daughter. “Our lives are now a sort of mission. We live everyday trying to bear witness to genocide and all the people who don’t know.”

Senior forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) works to identify the remains of a victim of the Srebrenica massacre [Dado Ruvic/Reuters]

Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina – The violent breakup of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War left a painful legacy. It is estimated the conflict claimed over 100,000 lives, with thousands more missing, amid the chaos of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Founded at the behest of then US president Bill Clinton at the G-7 summit in 1996, the ICMP was tasked with the almost impossible – to trace and identify the 40,000 people missing at end of the Yugoslav wars.

A skull missing a mandible sits upright on a stainless steel mortuary slab. Scattered around it are fragments of bone shaped into the form of a skeleton. A few ribs, a fibula, two tibias, a handful of fingers. A poster poster on the wall pleads in Bosnian and English, “Help Identify Your Loved Ones. Give Your Blood Sample”.

Among the unaccounted were the more than 8,000 killed in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The massacre that took place at Srebrenica was the largest atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War. Men and boys, overwhelmingly Bosnian Muslims, were shot in warehouses and bludgeoned to death on fields and football pitches.

A US soldier serving with the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia patrols while Bosnian forensic experts inspect bodily remains found in a mass grave in the eastern village of Kamenica, near the town of Zvornik [Danilo Krstanovic/Reuters]

Bosnian Serb forces used bulldozers to push the bodies of their vicitms into unmarked mass graves. The bodies were subsequently exhumed, sometimes multiple times, to hinder identification.

The international community is still struggling to define the extent of the killings, 20 years later, and Russia vetoed the UN genocide resolution on Srebrenica on July 9.

Another method

Now these scattered human remains lie on the mortuary table of Dragana Vucetic, a tenacious Serbian forensic anthropologist at the ICMP Tuzla lab.

“When they removed those skeletal remains, often with big trucks, they destroyed the integrity of individuals. So very often we don’t find complete bodies,” Vucetic said.

Many bodies were so badly decomposed that the ICMP identified just 140 Srebrenica victims in its first five years, mainly through clothing and body parts.

“We had to find another method for investigation. So we made a DNA lab.”

Blood was collected from over 70,000 Bosnians, both in the Balkans and across Europe where they had fled as refugees.

Within months of the DNA lab opening in 2001, the ICMP had its first positive match. By the close of the following year, it had found more than 500 additional matches.

So far ICMP has identified nearly 7,000 people who died in Srebrenica.

Hasan Hasanovic was just 19 when Bosnian Serb forces led by the notorious general Ratko Mladic overran the Srebrenica enclave in July 1995, without the Dutch peacekeeping forces firing a shot.

Along with around 15,000 Bosnian Muslim men, Hasanovic fled to the hills, walking more than 100 kilometres to safety. Just 3,500 survived “the death march.” Hasanovic’s father and his twin brother did not make it.

His father’s body was identified in 2003, and interred among the rows and rows of brilliant white marble headstones at the graveyard for Srebrenica victims, located across the road from the former Dutch base at Potocari.

The process of identifying the Srebrenica victims is arduous. Bone samples from victims are taken for DNA testing and matched with profiles on the ICMP database. Courts require that DNA matches are of 99.95 percent probability or higher.

Once a body has been formally identified, the person is officially pronounced dead.

The ICMP facility is open to the public but relatives are discouraged from visiting to see the remains. “It is very emotional for them to see skeletons. Usually they expect that they will see something else. After 20 years, it is still stressful when they come here and see bones,” said Vucetic.

In 2010, the ICMP contacted Hatidza Mehmedovic. The remains of her husband and two sons – both killed at Srebrenica in July 1995 – had been identified.

“They told me my younger son was a complete body but I wasn’t brave enough to go and see him,” she told Al Jazeera.

Now Mehmedovic has just one wish – closure for all those who lost loved ones when Bosnian Serb forces took Srebrenica.

“All we want is justice so the criminals get punished and we find those that are still missing so mothers can at all least get the satisfaction of finding their sons. Many mothers have died – and will die – without being able to bury a single bone.”

Many women in Srebrenica are still awaiting to hear about the whereabouts of their loved ones who disappeared during the war [Damir Sagolj/Reuters]

Almost 1,000 victims of the Srebrenica massacres are still missing and experts believe that at least one mass grave remains hidden in the verdant countryside in eastern Bosnia.

At the ICMP’s Tuzla facility, the remains of around 300 individuals await identification.

After identification, most will be interred during the annual July 11 commemorations at the Srebrenica victims’ graveyard. This year more than 100 people will be buried here.

Slow justice

In addition to identifying victims, the ICMP has played a key role in criminal prosecutions.

So far, 46 individuals have been put on trial at Bosnian state courts for their role in the Srebrenica massacre, including 38 people who have been charged with genocide.

The ICMP’s forensic evidence has been crucial in the 21 trials related to Srebrenica at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague, among them, the trial of Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

Despite these successes, justice has been “very slow” said Muhamed Durakovic, a Srebrenica survivor who now works for the ICMP in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo.

“There are hundreds of people roaming the streets of Srebrenica who are war criminals… Someone who took away your child is now working as a police officer or a public official in Srebrenica. To the victims that is totally unacceptable,” Durakovic said.

Meanwhile, a Srebrenica denial movement has sprung up. “Srebrenica hoax” is a popular search term on Google. Videos on YouTube promise the “real” story of what happened in July 1995, often using language and arguments familiar to Holocaust deniers.

Many of these denials emanate from Republika Srpska, an autonomous, majority-Serb region within Bosnia and Herzegovina. After the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which brought the conflict in Bosnia to an end, Srebrenica became part of Republika Srpska.

Workers dig graves at a memorial centre for Srebrenica Massacre victims in Potocari. Nearly 136 identified victims will be buried at a memorial cemetery during the ceremony, their bodies found in some 60 mass graves around the town [Dado Ruvic/Reuters]

Arguments over Srebrenica are symptomatic of the divided nature of contemporary Bosnia. “The political, economic and social situation has gotten worse since the war,” said Srecko Latal, a Sarajevo-based analyst with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

“You don’t have any ethnic mixing anymore in big towns. In schools a majority are mono-ethnic. Kids learn about other ethnic groups from the media and history books and they are all tainted,” said Latal.

The prospect of European Union membership, once held up as the goal that could unite post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, looks increasingly remote. In recent years, much of the international community has pulled out of the country.

Meanwhile, the ICMP is one of the few genuine success stories to emerge from the impoverished, fissiparous post-war Western Balkans.

Their innovative DNA approach has been exported around the world, helping to identify victims of natural disasters and political violence everywhere from the United States and the Philippines to Chile and Iraq.

Next year, however, the ICMP is set to move its main operations to The Hague.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s cash-strapped government is unlikely to step into the breach to fund expensive DNA laboratories.

In a grim irony, the future of the forensics lab at Tuzla could depend on discovering another Srebrenica mass grave, and soon.